Tuesday, September 28, 2010

CWG topical subject for books

Commonwealth Games in Delhi have inspired not just reams of reportage but also a bevy of books that detail everything from the history of the Games to how they are turning out to be a disaster. The latest among the growing corpus of books on the Games is Sellotape Legacy, Delhi & CommonwealthGames, a book that raises several disturbing questions about the Games. The main point of the book: The Delhi Games are basically about the politics of development, and the pretensions of a rising India that wants to use sports to show off its economic power at a cost of about Rs 66,000 crore.

Ask Nalin Mehta, the co-author, and he tells you, “Sometime around the Beijing Olympics, I was in an auto one day and talking about the Games when the auto driver got angry, shouting how it was a sham and how the money was being spent for just 12 days. His passion jolted us into thinking about the real meaning of these Games,” says Mehta, an honorary fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.

The book’s title, Sellotape Legacy, is prophetic in that it captures the mess the Delhi Games are in. Mehta foresaw it. “It was on the cards, based on what we saw. Part of the problem was the lack of expertise within the OC for organising such an event.”